Lost Pollock paintings declared fakes

The work of Jackson Pollock has long been disparaged by the detractors of modern art as 'looking like something that anyone could have painted'. So the findings of forensic scientist James Martin will be music to their ears. Martin reported to a gathering of art experts on Wednesday night that a cache of 32 Jackson Pollock paintings discovered in a Long Island storage room two years ago were indeed painted by anyone - but certainly not by Pollock.
 
Martin discovered that several of the paintings contained pigments that had yet to be created at the time of Pollock's death in a car accident in 1956, and that one had been painted on a board that dated from the late 1970s. The scientist was commissioned to analyse the artworks by their owner, Alex Matter.

If Martin's findings are correct, they will have deprived Matter, a New York filmmaker whose father was a close friend of Pollock's, of a huge fortune. The batch was once valued at $10m, but the recent hyperinflation in the art market saw a Pollock drip painting, similar to those found by Matter, set a record of $140m last November.
 
Matter's lawyer has already dismissed Martin's  findings as "incomplete and inconclusive." Matter will take scant consolation from the observation of Boston Globe art critic, Ken Johnson, who said: "If the two dozen small paintings are not by Pollock, then I'd like to congratulate whoever did make them. They are expert imitations." ·